In order for a school or university to strategically implement mobile learning, it must, as an institution:
• put learners at the centre
• ensure staff are on board and kept in the communication and policy loop
• consider cultural implications of employing technology often used for leisure
• consider cultural and other implications of expecting students to use their own equipment in their learning (in BYOD initiatives)
• consider cost including institutional wireless capacity, charging, and furniture in learning spaces
• plan for sustainability

Mobile charging station — a lucrative small business in some African countries. Photo by Adam Cohn on Flickr

Every institution will come at this differently, tackling these issues at different times and in different orders. Many find that the first mobile learning initiative serves as a Trojan Horse for further innovation, especially when previously disparate parties come together to accomplish such a project. At University of Leicester, the initial success of the ‘one-iPad-per-distance-Masters-student’ Criminology programme paved the way for a second one-iPad-per-student programme in the School of Education, and an attempted one-Kindle-per-student programme; this was a natural outcome since many questions and reservations were already resolved.

It is therefore worthwhile to consider some ‘quick win’ mobile learning scenarios:

1. Add a mobile stylesheet to the institutional website — so that any mobile device will nicely display the site
2. Add a mobile-friendly front end to an RSS feed. For example, many universities broadcast news via a blog, which creates an RSS feed. When this is run through Google Feedburner, a mobile-friendly RSS feed is created.
3. Set up social media accounts to broadcast news and updates.
4. Turn on the mobile version of your VLE or LMS. At University of Leicester, we began to make use of the Blackboard Mobile Learn app last autumn. This is not a free option within Blackboard, however.
5. Invest in secure SMS text messaging services on behalf of the institution. Sending texts to let students know a lecture has been cancelled is usually very well appreciated.
6. Try making some learning materials available not only as Word documents but as pdf (viewable on all mobile devices) and epub, and ask students for feedback on how they look on their devices. The free software Calibre easily converts a document to epub. It is best to save a Word document first as html, then import into Calibre, then convert to epub. Additionally it can be converted to mobi pocket, the format for Kindles.

Terese Bird, Learning Technologist and SCORE Research Fellow, University of Leicester